It’s been reported that he doesn’t like his voters. Of course he doesn’t, he’s a rich guy who really only values important, powerful, rich people. He can’t stand his voters. They are marks to him, just like the rubes who bought his Trump University courses.
He posts “something horrible” every day so I don’t know what he might be talking about but if he’s thinking of something else that Scavino might know about that’s “very sexually oriented” —
We already know too much. Much too much.
There has been something of a brouhaha this past week over a new book by Paul Waldman and Thomas Schaller called White Rural Rage. Evidently some political science scholars in the field felt that it was unfair to the rural voters by characterizing them as feeling rage instead of righteous anger. We urban types are mean as always and need to be more understanding of some people’s racism, xenophobia, misogyny and fetishistic Trump worship because well … they’re unhappy.
Waldman and Schaller responded. Here are some extended excerpts. You can read the whole thing here and you should.
When we wrote White Rural Rage, we knew that our provocative argument and book title would arouse ire on the far right. We were not disappointed. But we have been surprised by the ferocity of the criticism we have received from scholars of rural politics. Their response has made clear that there are unspoken rules about criticizing certain Americans—rules that get to the heart of the very case we have tried to make about the deep geographic divisions in our politics at this fragile moment in our nation’s history.
Pillorying Donald Trump is fine. Thundering against the MAGA movement is acceptable. Deep-dive analyses of the votes and voices of “downscale” whites? Sure. But if you dare to criticize the rural whites who are among Trump’s most devout followers, you’ll be met with an angry rebuke.
And so we have, in an article in Politico by Nicholas Jacobs, a political scientist who co-authored his own book, The Rural Voter, that was released a few months before ours; and another in The Atlantic by Tyler Harper, an environmental studies professor who has made it a personal crusade to attack us and our book. These pieces illustrate some of the very pathologies so common in the way scholars and pundits alike treat rural whites.
In recent years, research from political scientists showing some disturbing patterns of opinion among rural voters, especially rural whites, has begun to accumulate. But there is a clear discomfort with the implications of that research, even among some of these researchers. For instance, consider this quote: “Clearly, though, even when we account for composition effects related to race [i.e., the fact that rural America is whiter than the rest of the country], we see that racial resentment is higher in rural than in urban America.” That appears not in our book. It’s found on page 296 of Jacobs’s The Rural Voter.
Soon after, Jacobs and his co-author write, “On a range of race-related questions, responses from rural residents veer from those of other Americans—and even from other Republicans—in significant ways.” As you might have guessed, “veer from” is the euphemism they deploy to say that rural whites express more racist attitudes. “And yet,” they go on, “for many rural residents, attitudes about races are intimately linked to perceptions of hard work, self-reliance, a disdain for government handouts, and the dangers of elites.” What they’re arguing, then, is that it’s not that many rural whites (to reiterate, not all, but many) are racist per se, it’s just that they think nonwhites don’t work hard, aren’t self-reliant, and are the clients of nefarious “elites.”
Right. They’re just a little bit resentful of all those lazy … ahem ... welfare queens who are living on the government teat. It has nothing to do with their color, nothing at all. If anything it’s racist to suggest it does.
Given the important place hard work holds in the rural ethos, we find that result to be troubling, and we believe it deserves further discussion. In fact, as Katherine Cramer, author of The Politics of Resentment, the most oft-cited book about rural politics of recent years, told us when we interviewed her, if she were to write her book over again, “I would have written more about how racism is present even when people aren’t talking about it.”
Here is another quote, from a journal article that appeared after our book was finished: “We find that, contrary to popular belief, rural Americans may actually be less likely to support political violence [i.e., against fellow citizens] than their non-rural counterparts. Importantly, however, we find that some rural individuals—namely those who harbor higher levels of rural resentment—are more likely, on average, to support violence against the state.” The lead author of this piece is Kal Munis, another of our vocal critics. To our knowledge, nowhere outside this journal article has Munis mentioned this finding about rural support for violence against the state. With Donald Trump making clear once again that he will not accept an election he does not win, a position that led to a rather notable incident of violence against the state that took place on January 6, 2021, this seems highly relevant.
We call this phenomenon the “shouts and whispers” approach to social science discourse about rural whites. Find no difference between the political attitudes of rural whites and other Americans, or show that they have admirable values? Shout it from the rooftops. Uncover transgressive political beliefs among rural whites? Whisper it at a conference panel with a dozen people in attendance and no media to be found.
We wonder what would happen if rural politics scholars took to the online pages of places like Politico and The Atlantic to describe their more troubling findings. Actually, we don’t have to wonder: Their inboxes would be filled with the hateful and threatening emails we are receiving.
When it comes to rural resentments, again and again these scholars insist that if rural whites are mad, it’s only because they have good reason to be. We are hardly unaware of the sufferings of rural America, many of which are born from late-stage capitalism. In fact, we dedicate the second chapter of our book to the causes and consequences of declining economic opportunities, outmigration of ambitious young people, hospital and pharmacy closures, and other very serious problems that pervade rural American communities, white and nonwhite alike. In our reporting, we heard many moving stories about the challenges rural communities face.
What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.
And yet, the response to our book has been not just angry but personal at times. Harper delivered a torrent of abuse at us on social media, calling us “idiots” and “intellectual lightweights who wrote a dumb screed.” He also called us “soft-handed elites” and claimed that our book says that “white rural people are evil scum,” which of course it does not; that was one of many distortions of what we wrote that he sent out to his followers before penning his Atlantic article.
You are just not allowed, ever, to criticize Real Americans — and you know who I’m talking about. There will be hell to pay and not just from those people but from members of the left as well who immediately launch into paroxysms of self-righteous defensiveness on behalf of the poor downtrodden whiners.
The unwillingness to define and confront what’s going on in the nascent fascist movement in this country is downright shameful:
Most importantly, our critics refuse to seriously grapple with rural whites’ place in Trump’s movement as it grows increasingly authoritarian. In rising to the defense of their subjects, the scholars discount or ignore the disturbing beliefs many (though not all) rural whites hold and work hard to justify and validate their resentments. Not unlike how journalists trooped to “the heartland” after the 2016 election to give a respectful hearing to every Trump voter they could find, scholars of rural politics bend over backward to avoid saying anything that might reflect poorly on rural whites—even when it means downplaying their own research.
Rather than explore Trump’s rural white support, they offer facile explanations for it, preferring instead to blame liberals for rural resentments whose roots date back decades. They insist that Democrats must do more to cater to rural whites, while giving Republicans compliments for their political skill (“Republicans are the political party that has figured out how to speak to that rural identity effectively,” writes Jacobs). And they don’t acknowledge one of our core arguments: Republicans are winning rural votes but doing almost nothing to improve rural Americans’ lives.
[…]
What’s really going on here? Our critics claim they’re critiquing our methodology, but their real objection is to our message. We anticipated this defense of rural whites and their virtues, knowing that they are routinely described as more “real” than other citizens and therefore deserving of greater deference. In fact, Jacobs reports in The Rural Voter that 80 percent of rural citizens say they’re more likely to encounter the “real” America in rural spaces; so pervasive is this insult to other Americans that even 66 percent of suburban and urban dwellers say the same thing. To his credit, Jacobs agrees with us that no group of Americans is more “real” than any other. If only the conservative politicians and media figures who work so hard to stoke rural resentment concurred.
Our critics also say we “misrepresent” their work. We do not; we’re guilty only of assembling in one place a composite picture of rural white politics that shows worrying strains of opinion. Our critics want to believe—and worse, want others to believe—that sentiments in the places Trump enjoys his most overwhelming following have nothing to do with his racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, and valorization of violence, despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary. The more charitable view is that our critics failed to pull back the lens to notice that larger picture; the less charitable view is that they’ve seen it but prefer to obscure it from public view.
And guess what? There are plenty of people of color who live in rural American and for some crazy reason that these critics are unable to explain, they don’t have the same attitudes. I wonder why?
Those nonwhite rural Americans are almost invisible in the national media, as well as in the work of many scholars. Because we thought their stories are important, we traveled to rural communities with large nonwhite populations, including in the Albemarle region of North Carolina and Arizona’s “Copper Corridor.” The experience of people in those places—who are mostly ignored and enjoy little of the deference and political power their white counterparts do—only highlights the privileging of the white rural experience.
We would ask rural scholars to confront this question: How is it that rural minorities, who by most measures face even greater challenges in health care access and economic opportunity than their white counterparts, do not express weakened commitments to our democracy, or the anti-urban, xenophobic, conspiracist, and violence-justifying attitudes so many rural whites do? The Rural Voter dedicates just five of the book’s 414 pages to examining rural minorities, and it spends most of that limited space comparing the attitudes of rural minorities with urban minorities, thereby avoiding any deep consideration of how rural whites and nonwhites differ in their views or their experiences.
Those who have risen to defend the honor of rural whites insist that they have good reason to feel resentful; Jacobs even elevates resentment to a kind of virtue (“Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience,” he writes). But if the rural experience justifies resentment, should not rural minorities be equally if not more resentful than rural whites? Why aren’t they threatening their local elected officials, or marinating in conspiracy theories, or supporting demagogues eager to tear down American democracy? Too few scholars of rural politics confront these questions.
They go on to recount some of the more hysterical claims in these critical articles. It might as well be the early 2000s without any reevaluation of that stale old trope, “economic anxiety.”
Since our book came out, we’ve had many conversations with rural Americans—journalists, activists, and ordinary people—who have told us that it accurately reflects what they see in their communities. Christopher Gibbs is a case in point. A Maplewood, Ohio, farmer who raises corn, soybeans, and alfalfa hay and supervises an 85-head cow/calf operation, Gibbs is the board president of Rural Voices USA. A former Shelby County Republican Party chair who, remarkably, is now the county’s Democratic Party chair, Gibbs interviewed us for his podcast. He doesn’t agree with everything we write, but he told us that he “lives this book every day” in his rural county. He concluded our interview by saying our book may not provide an easy foldout “road map” to revive rural America, but “it’s chock full of clues” for those interested in “helping rural folks get what they deserve in policy.”
As we confront a presidential election in which one of the candidates is counting on white rural support to return him to the Oval Office so he can begin dismantling our democratic system, we can’t turn away and say everything in rural politics is fine.
Personally, I think those who rush to the defense of these folks are the ones talking down to them. They’re all adults. They have agency and they know what they’re doing. Coddling those who are eagerly rushing headlong into fascism doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
There are many rural whites who do not share these views but they are a minority. Donald Trump massively dominates among this cohort and they are his most ardent followers. We know what that means. I’ve ordered the book and will probably have more to say about it once I read it. This is an important subject and I trust these two people, whose work I’ve followed for years, more than any of those others to get it right. They understand the stakes.
If there’s one thing that characterizes this election season so far it’s the fact that the country remains as polarized as it’s been these last few years and both sides are very upset. But nobody seems to be able to figure out exactly why. Is it inflation or the media or the pandemic or too much doomscrolling or something else? There are plenty of theories but no consensus, at least not yet.
The most common explanation is that the economy is bringing everyone down. It’s hard to explain why people are so negative about it since the numbers are actually quite robust with the job market being the best it’s been since the 1960s and wages rising rapidly, especially for the people in the middle and working classes. For the first time in decades the gains in this economy are flowing to them instead of the upper 1%.
Here’s Sen. J.D. Vance lying about this on Fox News along with a graph showing the reality (which Fox viewers will never see.)
Inflation is often cited as the main reason for Americans’ dissatisfaction, mainly because only the older folks have ever experienced a sharp rise in prices before (the last time was in the late 70s and early 80s) so it came as a shock when the pandemic introduced it. People seem to have expected that when inflation eased prices would go back down to where they were before but that’s not how it works and it wouldn’t be a good thing if it did. Deflation would result in those wage gains and new jobs going back down as well. Still, people remember what the prices of eggs were before the pandemic and are angry that they are more expensive today. But is that enough to cause this overwhelming despondency in the culture at large?
This economic discontent expressed by many Americans these days has been called a “vibecession” defined by economics writer Kyla Scanlon as “a disconnect between consumer sentiment and economic data and why people feel bad about the economy, despite the economic metrics telling them that the economy is doing OK.” As this chart points out, most people are actually feeling pretty good about their own personal finances. They just think everyone else’s are getting worse.
That disconnect isn’t just about economics. Gallup routinely polls people about their sense of satisfaction in their personal lives and the direction of the country and the same weird phenomenon exists on that question. 78% of people say they’re satisfied with the way things are going personally, a number which has been more or less steady for two decades. Only 20% express satisfaction with the direction of the country.
Since people generally seem to feel pretty good about their personal situation, this leads one to take a hard look at the media since that’s mostly where people get their view of the country at large. I think it’s fair to say that the “vibecession” was pushed pretty hard in the press for the first two years of Biden’s term which has only recently begun to present a more balanced view of the economy. And when you add that to constant stories about people being dissatisfied and despondent, it created a negative feedback loop. Even as people were feeling pretty good about their own lives they were still depressed by what they perceived as other people’s despair.
Another plausible explanation for this national funk is the fact that the whole country just went through a once in a lifetime trauma that ended up with the deaths of well over a million people from COVID-19. Psychiatrists George Makari and Richard A. Friedman wrote in the Atlantic that we’re all dealing with unprocessed grief:
Almost overnight, most of the country was thrown into a state of high anxiety—then, soon enough, grief and mourning. But the country has not come together to sufficiently acknowledge the tragedy it endured. As clinical psychiatrists, we see the effects of such emotional turmoil every day, and we know that when it’s not properly processed, it can result in a general sense of unhappiness and anger—exactly the negative emotional state that might lead a nation to misperceive its fortunes.
I’m sure this has contributed greatly to this feeling of doom and gloom that seems to define this era of bad feelings. How could it not? But it’s hard to imagine how we could have come together to acknowledge what happened when we couldn’t even rally ourselves as a country in the midst of a major global crisis. We pretty much fell apart.
And that brings me to my own personal hypothesis about what’s bringing everyone down: it’s Donald Trump. From the moment he won the election in 2016, this country has been in a state of high anxiety. Recall that even in victory, Trump’s supporters were angry and aggressive and Trump immediately doubled down on his hostile rhetoric toward his opponents, stoking that rage. The other side reacted with the massive Women’s Marches that took place all over the world the day after the inauguration and that made them even angrier.
From that day until the insurrection on January 6th almost four years later there was never a day in which the country wasn’t on high alert because of what the president was doing whether it was a source of unmitigated joy for his followers or a source of barely restrained panic from everyone else. Scandal after scandal, bizarre embarrassing behavior in foreign capitals, reckless half-baked, inhumane policies were received by half the nation as brilliant creative destruction and the other half as careening toward disaster every single day. It culminated in a presidential performance during the pandemic that was like something out of a surreal horror film and a riot in the US Capitol.
When he finally flew off to his exile in Mar-a-Lago, I think most people, maybe even some of his followers, breathed a sigh of relief that maybe we could all take a breather. But he never went away. The angst and unease has never let up for eight long years and it’s taken a toll.
Trump and the right wing media spend all day, every day, working Republicans into a frenzy over one thing or another. Trump has made his crimes into a spectacle with him at the center of a great passion play as the Nelson Mandela of America. They have been convinced that unless Donald Trump is president this country is doomed. Most everyone else either doesn’t want to hear about it anymore or knows very well that the opposite is true.
America is in deep, deep distress right now and there’s no real mystery as to what’s causing it. It’s because of Donald Trump and the culture he created when he came down that escalator in 2015. It’s not going to get any better until he is defeated. If he isn’t, it’s going to get much, much worse.
Conservaytibes feel bad because their dear leader tells them its bad, liberals feel bad because Trump exists. It’s Trump.
Democrats regularly say three things that set my teeth on edge. It’s an ingrained cultural tic, I guess, and they recite them like the catechism without thinking.
First, they complain that conservative voters, particularly rural ones, vote against their best interests. See “Thank you for not voting your best interests” for what I think about that.
Second, they insist that every election is the most important of our lifetime. They seem to think this alarmist message is somehow motivating for their base. But is it? Really? When every damned election is the most important election of our lifetime, what happens instead is Democrats go into a defensive crouch. Innovation is off the table. They take no chances. Find another gear? Hell, no. For most campaigns, their idea of finding another gear is to do what they’ve always done, the way they’ve always done it, just more of it. That’s a dinosaur’s recipe for losing.
Finally — and I heard this again at an event last night — Democrats of a certain age love to joke that you should vote early and vote often. IN THIS POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT, they still say that. It’s the tired (and tasteless) political equivalent of Henny Youngman’s “Take my wife — Please!” Said tongue-in-cheek, the expression is variously attributed to corrupt Chicago politicians from a hundred years ago, but likely dates from earlier. Just stop.
Friends may get tired of hearing me say it’s a challenge to teach yellow dogs new tricks, but it’s true.
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“If you smell what the Rock is cooking,” so to speak, it’s long been clear that MAGAstan is more about posturing than policy. It’s about Trumpish attitude aided and abetted by his fans’ poor short-term memory. Donald Trump can say one thing on Monday and the opposite on Friday and fans couldn’t care less. Just as long as whatever he says is delivered loudly and proudly with the same shameless, in-your-face insincerity. Wrestling fans eat that shit up. They pay good money for it week after week. It’s not Sondheim or Shakespeare, but it’s theater.
Digby yesterday mentioned the “stale sameness” of the Trump rally and “the weird hypnotic nature of his speeches.” But it’s that sameness that mesmerizes, like endless Grateful Dead improvs, like the old Latin mass and Gregorian chants. People can lose themselves for a while in the rhythms and harmonies before returning to the real world. The attraction of sameness, of pithy catchphrases, of the anticipation of the all-too-familiar you know is coming, is something the left, with its demand for novelty, has never appreciated. As Anat Shenker-Osorio says, repetition is important. And so is repetition.
Donald Trump’s problem now is the novelty of not being in control. In a courtroom, he’s not in charge. His accustomed delaying tactics are failing him. His raging won’t be tolerated. He’s sweating. He’s flailing. He’s all over the place on abortion now that it’s clear the backlash from this week’s Arizona ruling threatens his reelection, the reelection he was counting on to keep him from ending his life in the slammer.
Behold. He’s backpedaling as fast as he can.
His cult won’t care. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hit him over the head with it like the folding chair conveniently left beside the ring.
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His middle of the night tantrums are getting worse and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s because his campaign has polled this too:
A majority of U.S. voters consider the criminal charges in New York related to a hush money payment against former President Trump to be serious, per new polling.
Trump is days away from the start of the first trial out of the four criminal cases against him, while electioneering for the presidency.
The New York trial, set to start on April 15 with jury selection, concerns a 2016 payment allegedly made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
About 4 in 10 Republican respondents considered the hush money charges to be serious.
Two-thirds of independents also deemed the charges serious.
64% of registered voters described the charges as at least “somewhat serious,” according to Reuters/Ipsos poll data published Wednesday.
34% said the charges lacked seriousness.
The rest were unsure or didn’t answer.
Appeals courts twice this week denied attempts from Trump’s legal team to delay the start of the trial.
Trump’s legal team has employed delay tactics in proceedings across the four jurisdictions where he faces criminal charges — and it’s currently not clear whether the three other cases will go to trial before the election.
Voters, already disillusioned with their candidate options in the 2024 election, considered charges in the other ongoing cases more serious, per Reuters/Ipsos.
About 74% of respondents said the charges of election fraud in Georgia against Trump were serious.
Does this guarantee that the trial will move numbers away from Trump? Not necessarily. But I think an awful lot of people have concluded that Trump will never have to face a jury for his criminal offenses and yet here he is. It may make some of them think a little bit. Maybe.
President Biden’s campaign on Thursday launched a seven-figure ad buy in Arizona, focusing on abortion on as the state grapples with the fallout from a state Supreme Court decision earlier this week that enabled an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions.
The Biden campaign has sought to link former President Donald Trump to near-total abortion bans since Trump appointed three conservative judges who were instrumental in the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump has touted his role in the effort to “kill” Roe v. Wade, although he has sought to distance himself from the Arizona decision.
“Because of Donald Trump, millions of women lost the fundamental freedom to control their own bodies,” Mr. Biden says direct to camera in the ad. “And now, women’s lives are in danger because of that. The question is, if Donald Trump gets back in power, what freedom will you lose next? Your body and your decisions belong to you, not the government, not Donald Trump. I will fight like hell to get your freedom back.”
Yes. Freedom. That’s the message.
I have often wondered about this. There really is a stale sameness about Trump aesthetics and I wondered why more people just don’t get sick of seeing it. He’s been doing this since 2016, down to the same suit and tie and many of the same lines. It seems to me that it should be hitting the point that it’s a nostalgia act for a one hit wonder.
But that’s just looking at it from a normal person’s standpoint. The MAGA cult is built on relentless repetition (indoctrination) and any deviation from that familiar cant is going to cause dissonance. These repetitive mantras, slogans and chants, the sameness of the events, Trump dressed exactly the same, the weird hypnotic nature of his speeches (which are now set to music) are what gives MAGA its power.
I guess my bigger question is, to the extent there are any normal Republicans left, why aren’t they tired of it and loathe to sign on for four more years of it? Even more pertinent, why aren’t they creeped out by it? This whole thing is becoming more and more ritualized and devotional. Do they relate to this? I guess many of them don’t take this stuff seriously but they’re going to find out just how serious it is if Trump pulls this off.
I know it’s somewhat trite to evoke the rise of fascism in the 1930s but there have been many books written about the power of the Nazi aesthetic and how it worked on the citizenry. There were many people at the time who thought it was ridiculous but it was actually an intrinsic part of its appeal so I don’t think we should underrate that in this case just because the clothing is so silly or the leader isn’t wearing a military uniform. This is 21st century America and Trump’s aesthetic is powerful to a whole lot of people.
This is fascinating and sadly, it might just work:
Steve Bannon no doubt thought he was being deviously clever. Speaking with The New York Times this week, he elaborated on a sophisticated plan that Donald Trump’s allies have developed for boosting third-party candidates, so they siphon votes from President Biden.
A key part of this scheme, Bannon noted, entails boosting expected Green Party candidate Jill Stein by highlighting oil production under Biden to pull environmentally concerned voters away from him. As Bannon put it:
No Republican knows that oil production under Biden is higher than ever. But Jill Stein’s people do. … Stein is furious about the oil drilling. The college kids are furious about it. The more exposure these [third-party candidates] get, the better it is for us.
Whoa, that’s some serious 11-dimensional chess, Steve! Except for one thing. If you think for a second about Bannon’s quote—that “oil production under Biden is higher than ever”—it entirely undermines one of Trump’s biggest lies: the claim that Biden’s effort to transition the United States to a decarbonized economy has destroyed the nation’s “energy independence,” leaving us weak and hollow to our very core.
This saga captures something essential about how MAGA-world fights the information wars. You’ll note that Bannon is not even slightly troubled by the idea that telling the truth about Biden’s record to one set of voters—left-leaning, green-minded ones—might contradict one of Trump’s most frequent lies to countless others.
It isn’t just that for Bannon, assertions should be evaluated purely for their instrumental usefulness. It’s also that he apparently has total confidence that voters who really need to hear the truth he uttered—those in the industrial and Appalachian heartlands who are the targets of Trump’s propaganda—never, ever will, even if he admits to it right in the paper of record.
And he knows that if they do hear it, they will dismiss it as fake news because they’ve been indoctrinated by Donald Trump into believing that anything that contradicts or challenges their worldview is by definition, fake.
McCay Coppins in the Atlantic:
It’s a lesson drawn from demagogues around the world: When the press as an institution is weakened, fact-based journalism becomes just one more drop in the daily deluge of content—no more or less credible than partisan propaganda. Relativism is the real goal of Trump’s assault on the press, and the more “enemies of the people” his allies can take out along the way, the better. “A culture war is a war,” Steve Bannon told the Times last year. “There are casualties in war.”
This attitude has permeated the president’s base. At rallies, people wear T-shirts that read rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required. A CBS News/YouGov poll has found that just 11 percent of strong Trump supporters trust the mainstream media—while 91 percent turn to the president for “accurate information.” This dynamic makes it all but impossible for the press to hold the president accountable, something Trump himself seems to understand. “Remember,” he told a crowd in 2018, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Moreover, the MAGA people don’t care if it’s true or not. They love Trump even if they know he’s lying and they hate everyone else even if they know they’re telling the truth. It’s not about facts, truth or reality with these people.
But that isn’t the only issue. I wish I had faith that lefties wouldn’t take the bait on this and would look at the big picture but they won’t. We’ve seen this time and again and we have other candidates to fill this role beyond Jill Stein. As you know, Bannon’s the one who pushed RFK Jr into the race too.
It won’t take much to throw the election to Trump in those swing states. 2000 and 2016 are two perfect examples of how well this strategy can work. Bannon’s not reinventing the wheel here.
He thinks he can wash his hands of the abortion issue but I’m afraid the blood isn’t going to come off that easily:
Back in 2022, when it looked as if the Supreme Court would soon overturn Roe v. Wade, Senate Republicans’ campaign arm sent out a memo encouraging GOP candidates to get their messaging right.
“Republicans DO NOT want to throw doctors and women in jail,” the memo maintained. It cast the statement as a rebuttal to Democrats’ “lies” about the GOP’s abortion positions.
Donald Trump did not get the memo.
The former president on Wednesday responded to the Arizona Supreme Court’s reviving a harsh 1864 abortion ban — which indeed threatens abortion providers with two to five years in prison — by punting on this basic issue.
Asked whether doctors who provide abortions should be punished, Trump allowed that certain states could do that.
“I’d let that be to the states,” Trump said. “You know, everything we’re doing now is states and states’ rights. And what we wanted to do is get it back to the states, because for 53 years it’s been a fight. And now the states are handling it. And some have handled it very well, and the others will end up handling it very well.
Making 10 year old girls give birth to their brother? Don’t ask me, it’s up to the states. Denying pregnant women emergency medical care because a legislature is scientifically illiterate? What can I say? It’s up to them. Burning women agt the stake? Hey, this is a state matter, it has nothing to do with me.
He obviously thinks he’s off the hook with this “I’m proud to have overturned Roe vs Wade and now it’s up to the states, buh bye” routine but it’s not going to fly. His proud Roe moment is what led to these atrocities in states around the country and simply shrugging his shoulders and saying it’s not his problem isn’t going to solve it.